Friday, December 14, 2012

Consciousness, Perception and the Brain

If a tree falls in
the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? At first you might think, “of course it still
makes a sound!” until further defining what “sound” actually means: the
sensation produced by stimulation of the organs of hearing by vibrations
transmitted through the air or other medium (dictionary.com). When a tree falls there are certainly
pressure waves vibrating through the air, but since “sound” is a quality of
consciousness, if no ears are around to “hear” those waves, then the tree
literally does not make a sound.

“To the
surprise of many, the world ‘out there’ has turned out to be quite unlike our
experience of it. Consider our experience of the color green. In the physical
world there is light of a certain frequency, but the light itself is not green.
Nor are the electrical impulses that are transmitted from the eye to the brain.
No color exists there. The green we see is a quality appearing in the mind in
response to this frequency of light. It exists only as a subjective experience
in the mind. The same is true of sound. I hear the music of a violin, but the
sound I hear is a quality appearing in the mind. There is no sound as such in
the external world, just vibrating air molecules. The smell of a rose does not
exist without an experiencing mind, just molecules of a certain shape.” -Peter
Russell, “The Primacy of Consciousness”

What we call
“colors” or “sounds” or “smells” are all qualities created in consciousness
which have no independent existence without a sentient observer. Colors are just electromagnetic energy of a
specific frequency, sounds are just vibrations of specific patterns, and smells
are just various combinations of air molecules - all of which require the key
element of consciousness to mystically transform these energetic emanations
into our intricate and amazing everyday sensations.

“All
our perceptions, sensations, dreams, thoughts and feelings are forms appearing
in consciousness. It doesn't always seem that way. When I see a tree it seems
as if I am seeing the tree directly. But science tells us something completely
different is happening. Light entering the eye triggers chemical reactions in
the retina; these produce electro-chemical impulses which travel along nerve
fibers to the brain. The brain analyses the data it receives, and then creates
its own picture of what is out there. I then have the experience of seeing a
tree. But what I am actually experiencing is not the tree itself, only the
image that appears in the mind. This is true of everything I experience.
Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every color, sound, sensation, every
thought and every feeling, is a form appearing in the mind. It is all an
in-forming of consciousness.” -Peter
Russell, “The Primacy of Consciousness”

Electromagnetic
radiation with a wavelength between 380 and 760 nanometers (frequency of
790–400 terahertz) is detected by the human eye and perceived as visible light;
everything beyond that is invisible to us.
All the colors of the rainbow and absolutely everything we see comes
from just a narrow frequency on an infinite electromagnetic spectrum. Our highest perceivable frequency, at 790
terahertz, is the color violet. However
with the use of tools/technology we know that above violet are ultra violet
light, X-rays, and gamma rays. Our
lowest perceivable frequency, at 400 terahertz, is the color red. However, with the use of tools/technology we
know that below red are infrared, microwaves, and radio waves. The spectrum is infinite, yet we base our
entire experience on the minute sliver perceivable to us and assume that is “reality.”

“Our eyes
detect none of these other frequencies, and our image of reality represents but
a tiny fraction of what is there. The
same holds true of the other senses. What we hear, smell and taste is but a
limited sample of the physical reality. Furthermore, there are aspects of the
physical world, such as magnetic fields and electric charge that have very
little, if any, impact on our experience.”
-Peter Russell, “From Science to God”

“In the space that you are occupying now are all the radio
and television frequencies broadcasting to your area. You can't see them and
they are not aware of each other because you and they are on different
frequencies, or wavelengths. Only when the frequencies are really close do they
experience 'interference'. It is the same with our reality. Our 'physical
world' is just one of countless wavelengths, frequencies or dimensions, and to
experience and interact with this realm we need an outer shell that is
vibrating within this frequency range. Our consciousness is vibrating too fast
to interact efficiently with this frequency … The body is the means through
which our Infinite
Awareness can directly experience this range of frequencies that I will call,
to keep it simple, the five-sense realm, world or dimension. This is why the
five senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste are so limited. They are
confined to perceiving only this range of frequencies - this dimension.” –David Icke, “The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy” (13-14)

So in
the universe there exists an infinite array of electromagnetic radiation, but
only the tiniest glimpse of that array is available for sensory
experience. Our physical bodies act like
electromagnetic transistors for our awareness by switching on/off, amplifying
or muting the multitude of signals around us and funneling what we focus
on. All visual, auditory, kinesthetic,
olfactory, and gustatory sensations are brought to our consciousness through this
frequency decoding process, just like tuning a radio, and in the grand scheme
of things, we are barely receiving a signal.

“There
is no 'solid' world 'outside' of you. All those people, streets, cars and
buildings only exist, in that 'solid' 3D state, in your mind. Everywhere else,
they are frequency fields, thought fields, energy matrices, call them what you
will. Television and the Internet are perfect illustrations of what I am
talking about here. When we think of television we think of pictures and programs,
but the only place television exists in that form is on the TV screen.
Everywhere else television consists of frequency broadcasts and electrical
circuitry. When we think of the Internet we think of websites, pictures and
graphics, but the only place the Internet exists in that form is on your
computer screen. Everywhere else it consists of mathematical codes and
electrical circuitry … To summarize: the 'physical' world is a tiny frequency
range or dimension within Infinite Awareness - the 'ocean'. The body-computer
tunes us into this strictly limited sense of perception, this television
channel, and acts as our vehicle to interact with this 'world'. We have been
manipulated into believing that 'we' are the computer and its mental, emotional
and physical software programs. This dimension, like all the others, is a mass
of frequency fields that the body-computer decodes into apparently 3D scenes,
but in that form they only exist in the brain or, more accurately, the energy
matrix we call the brain. There is no 'physical' world unless it is observed
into form - decoded into form.” –David
Icke, “The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy” (35-7)

The “outside”
world around us has a convincing appearance of being “out there” somewhere,
when in actuality the 3D world is no more “out there” than a dream. In dreams we perceive sights, sounds, and
sensations, we have all our emotional and rational faculties, we encounter
people, places and situations all seeming to be happening in a world “out
there” around us. Not until we awaken do
we realize that all those sights, sounds, sensations, people, places, and
situations were simply creations of our minds, appearing around us, but coming
from within us.

“Since
the Greeks, philosophers have been thinking about ‘the ghost in the machine’,
‘the small man within the small man’ etc.
Where is ‘I’, the person who uses his brain? Who is it that realizes the act of knowing? As Saint Francis of Assisi said: ‘What we search for is the one
that sees.’” -Ken Wilber, “Holographic
Paradigm” (37)

“Today, after thirty years of investigation
into the nature of consciousness, I have come to appreciate how big a problem
consciousness is for the contemporary science. Science has had remarkable
success in explaining the structure and functioning of the material world, but
when it comes to the inner world of the mind – to our thoughts, feelings,
sensations, intuitions, and dreams – science has very little to say. And when
it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is
nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account
for our having an interior world.” -Peter Russell, “From Science to God”

How
and why do we have an inner life at all?
Professor of Philosophy at University
of Arizona, Dr. David
Chalmers has coined this issue, “the hard problem” of consciousness. How could any complex material process in
the brain create our rich immaterial internal worlds of thought, emotion,
sensation, and perception? Why is there
a subjective aspect to reality at all?

“Nothing in Western science predicts that
any living creature should be conscious. It is easier to explain how hydrogen
evolved into other elements, how they combined to form molecules, and then
simple living cells, and how these evolved into complex beings such as
ourselves than it is to explain why we should ever have a single inner
experience.” -Peter Russell, “From Science to God”

Let’s
put the “hard problem” of consciousness through the process of
elimination. We now know from multiple
experiments in quantum physics that quanta, the building blocks of matter, the
fundamental units of “stuff” in the universe, do not become a set “something”
with definite properties, location, and materiality without the key element of
consciousness to collapse the wave function; In other words, no consciousness,
no matter. So if consciousness is
supposedly an emergent property of a Newtonian/Darwinian mechanistic universe,
what used to collapse the wave function in the days before the “evolution of
consciousness?”

“[Since]
a key component in the quantum measurement process includes an observer and his
or her knowledge, this means the mind is inextricably wound into quantum
reality … Based on the classical assumptions of local realism and mechanism,
the brain – like any other physical object – is a clockwork object. Since clockworks are not conscious, then what
we call ‘I’ can only be an emergent property of a complicated piece of
machinery. And thus our sense of
conscious awareness, or the feeling one has when smelling a rose, are illusions
– though illusions to whom is not quite clear.
From a classical physics point of view, the ‘you’ that is currently
reading this sentence is an illusion.
This seems to be a rather important limitation, as most people reading
these sentences probably believe that they (their conscious minds) do exist.” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (256-7)

We often falsely assume that we are our physical bodies because
our consciousness seems trapped inside.
We feel pain and pleasure, all emotions, perceptions and sensations
through the body and so we identify with it, but is the body who/what we really
are? If your leg gets cut off, is the
leg still you? Or was the leg just a
tool, a vehicle you used to experience the physical realm?

“We are energy beings residing in bodies so that we can experience
this physical dimension. The
relationship between our energy being and our physical body is kind of like a
person driving a car, except imagine that the person driving believes the car
is their true being. It might strike you
as funny to imagine a person who believes that they are the car, but that is
the way most of us think of ourselves.
We do not separate our physical bodies from the pure energy being that controls
the body. When people drive cars, they
do not become car-beings. We are the
energy beings within our bodies.”
-Eric Pepin, “Handbook of the Navigator” (111-112)

Anyone who has experienced an OBE, NDE, or taken DMT will tell you
emphatically that we are not our physical bodies. Indigenous peoples and shamanic cultures regularly
practiced meditation, “dreamtime,” trance-inducing chants, dances, fasts and
ingested psychedelic entheogens all of which put them directly in touch with
non-physical aspects of their consciousness.
Even the staunchest materialists are compelled beyond their will every
night to relax their bodies to sleep while their consciousness travels to
various dream worlds/dimensions beyond the physical. The signs are all around us but the point is
easy to miss: the physical world is simply a recurring dream that we awaken
from when our bodies die.

“So the first revelation on the road to freedom: your body is
not 'you' - it is a fantastic biological computer that 'you' are using to
experience this reality. It is a
vehicle, a means, not a 'you' or an
'I'. The spacesuit is the means by which
an astronaut can experience other 'worlds'.
So is your 'body'. We are not our
bodies; we are Infinite Consciousness, the All That Is, a seamless energy field
within which all 'worlds' and no 'worlds' exist. The only difference between everything is the
level of awareness that we are All
That Is. The deeper this awareness, the
more you will access that level of 'knowing' and perception; the more you think
you are an 'individual' and apart from everything else, the more you will disconnect from the
Infinite One that you really are.” –David Icke, “The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy” David Icke Books (2)

Still unconvinced that you are not your body? Did you know that every 5 to 7 years, every
single cell in your body dies and is replaced?
Your entire body, every cell in your brain, every cell in your eye,
absolutely everything that composes your physical body has died and been
replaced multiple times. Meanwhile, your
unique essence, your feeling of “I am-ness,” your consciousness, has remained
exactly the same as when you were a child.

“This
feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat
contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in
the sciences. We do not ‘come into’ this
world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe
‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression
of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by
most individuals. Even those who know it
to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of
themselves as isolated ‘egos’ inside bags of skin [but] the cat has already
been let out of the bag. The inside
information is that yourself as ‘just little me’ who ‘came into this world’ and
lives temporarily in a bag of skin is a hoax and a fake. The fact is that because no one thing or
feature of this universe is separable from the whole, the only real You, or
Self, is the whole. The rest of this
book will attempt to make this so clear that you will not only understand the
words but feel the fact.” -Alan
Watts, “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (53)

12
comments:

I think the concept "we are not our body" is as true as the concept "we are our body." An infinite circle would be to us like a straight line, proved Cusa: truth, like the infinite, is paradoxical. We are universe, we are man. And man is mind, emotion and body: thoughts, feeling and action. To think and feel, to have a conscience, but not to act is be no more alive than the dead skull and bones of the psychopath, a being of thoughts and actions but no feeling. To believe yourself to be two-thirds of a man, 66.6 percent, is to believe yourself subhuman. I do not disagree with your thesis Eric, but we must embrace our humanity, 100 percent so.

Thanks for your thoughts Nonoun. I'm not belittling the physical, ignoring our humanity, or denying our materiality. I agree with your statement that "we are not our body is as true as the concept we are our body." It is blatantly obvious that "we are our body" and everyone unconsciously identifies with their bodies anyway. Most people (especially atheists/scientific materialists) however, do NOT understand the statement "we are not our body" and believe themselves to be nothing but an assemblage of physical bits and pieces with no soul.

If we have no soul, then ultimately we ARE our body and nothing more, when our physicality dies, our identity dies. If we do have souls, then ultimately we are NOT our bodies because when our physicality dies, our consciousness/soul still exists.

And I agree, structure (physicality) leads to identity, both are formed by the concentration of relationships and freedoms. How do you know your ears from your nose? Their relationships and freedoms. A freeman from a slave? The psychopathic brain from the holistic?

I read your article, not as an atheist knowers, I but as a chap who really should do more. You know, when I write a comment, I'm usually writing it to myself. Writing is thinking out loud.

keep doing your thing Eric this is not a bash on your esoteric psychedelic truth seeking adventure, but when people start talking about how reality is an illusion of our conscious minds and this and that i say... no reality is real... thats why they call it reality, how well you play the game in this reality matrix defines your life and while its cool to research esoteric pysecadilic spiritual other worldy things that we might never fully comprehend i start to think spending time thinking about that stuff is truly a waste of your time and accomplishes nothing.

The physical world is real as far as i can tell its the only thing that matters in your life, wondering about what happens later is cool too, thinking about time and consciousness is cool too, when your on trippy drugs that make you trip and question such things.

but when you enter back into reality spending any significant amount of time and energy thinking about... time and energy is a... a waste of time and energy!

its not my intentions to be negative, i've been guilty of wasting a ton of time thinking about the unknown myself. But once 12-21-12 passes and nothing happens i'm going to go back to living and assuming that

there will be no solar flaresno massive earthquakesyellow stone will not eruptthe power will not go outa NWO wont be succesfulfema camps arent evil(thats a stretch i know)

and when you die you find out the truth about reality and the truth about death.

side note, I know scientology is probably a cult, but they take a scientific religous view of life and death and basically concur that your body is a vehicle for this physical reality and your soul is your vehicle for eternal life.

Einstein said he believes in a life after death because nature wastes nothing and its true. Just like a Apple has a seed inside thats reborn into a tree again, our body has a soul inside that is reborn to life after we die, in another place in another time.

Eric do you think this recent shooting in sandy hook is a false flag and designed to coincide with the FEMA storm hurricane Sandy?

There are many curious things about it like why in america does this happen and nowhere else, why there is such a high ratio of deaths to injurys (if some kid was just spraying bullets there would be more injurys and less deaths).

The obvious goal to take away guns the one thing keeping americans from being rounded up and put in FEMA camps.

Eric dont get me wrong i LOVE your blog i think its awesome but when i read all this abstract stuff it has be craving you to cover the un-truthing of some of the events going on right now thats all!

"... spending any significant amount of time and energy thinking about... time and energy is a... a waste of time and energy!"

Curiosity is essential for learning. Learning is the partner of creativity. The only way to create balance and harmony in our world is through learning how to create balance and harmony.

if you understand time (process) you will understand that there is no beginning and end, but rather that everything is cyclical. And if you go further you will find that cycles are spirals that unfold and enfold. That awareness is essential to someone whose goal is to create harmony. The knowledge of time is one of the great keys to wisdom, and every traditional society knew it.